Mad Monarch As Gang Lord

By RICHARD CORLISS

KING LEAR

At the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, Minimogul Menahem Golan sat down with Jean- Luc Godard and, on a table napkin, jotted down a movie contract. Cinema's old enfant terrible (Breathless, Weekend, Hail Mary) would write and direct a modern King Lear. Norman Mailer would play the mad monarch, Woody Allen the fool.

Guess what? Things didn't work out quite that way. Allen, identified as "Mr. Alien," does deadpan a bit of Shakespeare's text. Mailer and his daughter Kate do appear briefly, but the novelist indulged in a "ceremony of star behavior" and left town. So Godard vamped. He hired Burgess Meredith to play a gang-lord Lear (with many Mailer intonations) and Molly Ringwald as Cordelia. And he turned the film into a cynical, pun-laden, nonlinear meditation on virtue vs. power.

"Are you trying to make a play for my daughter?" asks Meredith of one William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth (Theater Director Peter Sellars). Well, yes -- and the play he wants to make for her is King Lear. The film, though, could be called The Comedy of Eras. With his usual dour brio, Godard mixes allusions from five centuries of drama, painting, film. He presides onscreen too, speaking like a deranged Hitchcock, his hair a Rastafarian tangle of phone cords, stereo jacks and dog tags. The whole sport makes for Godard's most infuriating, entertaining pastiche in two decades. It's nice to know he is still making trouble, trashing the cozy citadel of narrative film.